Convenience is Job #1

This weekend a letter to the editor in the Washington Post has prompted a lot of discussion. I'll just say a few things about it, but it's not worth going into the same well-trod territory again.

The traffic is grueling... The increase in bicycles and scooters complicates matters. Bike lanes make things safer and smoother. But not all bicyclists obey traffic laws, even the big ones — don’t run a red light, stop while oncoming cars have a left-turn signal.

If by complicated, she means scooters and bikes makes traffic worse, that's probably not true. A bike creates only ~25% as much traffic congestion as a car, so depending on the mode shift (transit to bike, ped to bike and car to bike, etc...) it may be bad or good or a wash. It's true that not all bicyclists obey traffic laws, pretty much like every other group of road users. But it's not clear how any of this is relevant except as a form of pre-confession whataboutism.

And if you ever call out the rule-breakers, you get an earful of pretty foul language as they fly away with their middle fingers held up.

That probably depends on how you call them out.

But here’s what happened when a rule-abiding cyclist called me out when I broke a traffic rule (a lesser one, in my opinion):

Her opinion is her own, but we - as a District - have actually decided which is lesser and which is not. The fine for running a stop light on a bike is $25, for blocking a bike lane is $65. So, there you go.

The other parent took a really long time to pull out, longer than I expected him to take. But the longer I waited, the more I needed to see it through.

This makes no sense to me except maybe that people are irrational about sunk costs.

One cyclist waited behind me. When it was finally time for me to pull into the spot, she came around to my window and told me that there’s a law prohibiting obstruction of the bike lane. I (pretty sternly) told her I was waiting for a spot and it had obviously taken longer than I had anticipated. She suggested I should have circled the block rather than create what was, in her view, a safety hazard. I told her that’s not the way the world works. But what I meant was, that’s not the way cities work.

So this is the critical part right here. It would have been consistent to say "Sorry, I didn't know" or "I don't believe in laws" or "I don't follow laws that don't makes sense and this one doesn't." But she doesn't. She thinks following the law is of value (as noted above), she seemed to know she was breaking it and she didn't argue that the law as written didn't make sense. Instead she argued that "that's not how cities work" which is something SHE complained about earlier in the letter.

The traffic is grueling, made worse by all the people trying to stop to let someone out, to pick someone up or to deliver something right in the middle of the street.

Which is what SHE did. She's part of the very problem she identified at the start of her letter.

She did concede that she should have apologized. This part is pretty key too.

But not every violation is a hazard. We live in a city where things can’t always be orderly. Better to focus on the violators who are making the roads more dangerous.

It's true that not every violation is a hazard. If you allow your driver's license to expire by one day and then drive anyway, that's not a hazard. But there's no way for her to know how dangerous stopping in a bike lane is because, as far as I know, no one has studied it. We know that bike lanes make roads safer for cyclists and drivers (and discourage sidewalk cycling too), so we could surmise that removing one by blocking it makes it less safe. In a Colbert-esque truthiness sense, that certainly FEELS true; but honestly we don't know.

What we do know is that it inconveniences cyclists (and other road users who have to adjust). It does so for the convenience of the driver who is stopped. When you break the law and inconvenience others for your own convenience, that may not be hazardous, but it is without a doubt rude and selfish. We should probably not do that.

Better to focus on the violators who are making the roads more dangerous. (I’d start with the cyclists, but that’s just me.)

I'm not going to go into it, but that's just stupid.

Still, if we’re going to cite everyone who double-parks for a couple of minutes (with her signal on, to warn everyone behind her),

People like this would easily lose the ammunition in their arguments if bicyclists stopped being so flippant about breaking every rule they can find. Drivers are the ones in power and when they see the constant stream of bikers blowing through stop signs and red lights they are going to keep writing letters like this reminding all of the readers of the post that we don't deserve to be treated well.

If people on bikes followed every single rule, drivers would still complain.

They'd just complain about rules that don't exist, such as not wearing a helmet, riding in the street, riding on the sidewalk outside downtown, wearing something other than hi-viz, filtering, endangering children by putting them in a trailer, biking too fast, biking too slow, refusing to ride in the gutter, etc., etc., etc...

Its jealousy, really, and physics. Car drivers complain about cyclists because bikes don't get caught in traffic and that is not fair. Cyclists are just not following the rule [of physics] that car drivers need to follow.

Then maybe we should stop complaining about drivers breaking the law due to their own convenience since stopping at red lights is inconvenient since you have to unclip so you might as well go through it? Something about glass houses and stones. If people have every right to run red lights because its inconvenient on one mode of transportation (bikes) then the people in the other mode of transportation (cars) should be treated equally which puts my pedaling ass in danger and I don't like that.

There must be someone at the Post who works in the Letters department who really has it in for cyclists. Think about it this way: a letter like this must be the best that they get in order to be the one they pick.

Years ago, back when the Post had an ombudsman, I wrote to her to complain about the anti-cyclist letters. Not their viewpoint, but the fact that they didn't meet the journalistic standards of the Post. Pretty uniformly they're full of made-up "facts," references to laws that exist only in the mind of the author, hyperbole and logical fallacies. The ombudsman's response was that she lived in Glen Echo, had to deal with cyclists on MacArthur Boulevard, and didn't like cyclists either.

My position has not changed. I don't really care if you break the law. I do care if you behave in a way that is unsafe or inconsiderate. If you want to talk about times when cyclists are unsafe or inconsiderate, I'm all ears. Unfortunately, you are obsessed with the times they break the law, and as I said, I don't care about that.

If a driver wants to stop in a bike lane in such a way as to not to inconvenience anyone, I'm fine with that. I'm not sure how that is done, but OK.

So, I hope you can see the difference between blocking a bike lane and making others stop or go around you, and rolling through a stop sign and causing absolutely no one to change anything at all.

"Then maybe we should stop complaining about drivers breaking the law due to their own convenience since stopping at red lights is inconvenient since you have to unclip so you might as well go through it? "

Unclipping is like putting the car in park so yes, that's a pretty big inconvenience that we think its okay to put on bikes but not cars.

Anyway, the whole "but I saw X do it!" response should have been done away with as a child but here we are.

I'm team let-no-bike-lane-blockage-go-unchallenged. We are the primary mechanism for ensuring that bike lanes don't simply get repurposed for cars, as has happened in many, many places. If I see you blocking a lane, I will stop, ask you to move. If you do not, I will loudly announce that I am recording the interaction, and that I am about to call the police. And then I do. Given that most people will move my that point, it's worth it. Those who still don't move? Then you have to decide how far you want to take it, staying within the law at all times.

I was at a meeting tonight and I thought how quick and certain the enforcement is when someone overstays in a space where there is no parking during rush hour. We do that to prevent congestion. Certainly we can do the same for safety (though the safety benefits are, at best, small).

The well trodden lack of merit in her arguments aside I’d have thought that a law degree might have instilled a modicum of circumspection about looking foolish in the most spectacular way one could but apparently not in this instance.

More than ever, I'm seeing mothers and fathers commuting in DC with their children in bobike carriers, bakfiets, trailers, etc. This trend will grow only if DC becomes safer for bicyclists. With 2 dead so far this summer, there's much work that needs to be done.

I'd say unclipping is more like engaging the clutch or putting the car in neutral. A more appropriate analogy for park might be using a kickstand.

The clip mechanism itself is an equipment choice that enables stronger control and more powerful riding, when compared to platform pedals. However, there are tradeoffs involved when riding in a city where frequent stopping is necessary. Sort of like the pros and cons between manual and automatic transmission vehicles.